Natural State Dog Training

06/26/2025

Foxxy enjoying some off leash time

06/16/2025

Foxxy is about a week into her board and train. She is pretty nervous out in public. When we are passing people in the park she is really uncertain and uses all of the flexi leash to go as wide around them as possible. It’s getting better but that’s how we started. In this clip we are playing tug while a maintenance guy is working on the field. Once she was full of endorphins from play we went to meet him and it couldn’t have gone better. Now she has a new friend that started as a scary stranger. And by the way, victory laps are her favorite thing ever.

05/27/2025

This is Sunny and this was our third private lesson. Sunny’s owner reached out because of some pretty intense reactivity. They already had a great foundation. They do tons of off leash hikes and her recall is great. She had good obedience and loved tug. But on leash city walks were another story. So we started lesson 1 on tug gaining control of the arousal and teaching what both yes and no mean. Lesson 2 was on a flexi in a park with dogs in sight just working more recall but adding in a release command. On lesson 3 we said no to the reactivity. I brought my new guy and we also had someone else show up with their dog as planted distractions. Sunny reacted to both. Once we said no she started to explore other options. We ended up packing up for a peaceful neighborhood walk and ended with Sunny playing tug while she had new dogs in the audience. Her owner reached out over the weekend to give an update. Sunny had walked by dogs in the neighborhood and a busy park without issue. If you have been struggling with your dogs reactivity for a long time please reach out, it doesn’t have to be that way.

04/16/2025

Cleo the frenchie got here a few days ago for the board and train. We are doing the usual things but this time with my dogs is really important. Most of our day is spent just doing this, hanging out with little expectation. She has changed a lot in a week and most of the change so far is from their influence, not mine.

03/03/2025

Getting dogs off leash and in the woods is so important. This is still one of my favorite things I get to do with dogs. It’s giving them time with peace and quiet to just be a dog and it has a huge impact on their state of mind.
Side note- one thing I routinely see people do that I do not do is use recall around the house for every little thing. I see people telling their dog “come” from 2 ft away. To me that dilutes the command. I’m not saying you can’t ask them to come to you but how is important. There are a number of ways to ask them to come near from a pat on the leg to an informal “come here girl” that work just fine when it’s not urgent. I want recall or the formal “come” command to be fast and reliable and so I want the dog to believe that it is urgent, because it is.

03/01/2025

02/14/2025

This is Penny. She is one of the sweetest dogs I have ever met, and she’s also pretty timid. A lot of her program is centered around building confidence. And where did we start? Play
This spot is a lot of things to us. We come here to play every day. Because of that, she feels great here. She’s anticipating good things. So it’s a great place to introduce new concepts that she might have struggled with before. Today we are using it as a recovery spot. She got pretty spooked in the neighborhood by a big truck and trailer. So we are here, doing what she loves, and bringing confidence back to baseline.

01/24/2025

It’s funny how different my lessons look now from when I first started training dogs. In the beginning, right out of the gate I was focused on teaching behaviors. Lots of repetitions. I still cared greatly how the dogs felt but I thought starting the work was the best way to impact how they felt. Now I would say it’s the opposite. I spend much less time teaching behaviors and I don’t do near the repetitions. The majority of our time together is focused on fulfillment through exploring off leash,play, and just hanging out. Once their needs are met learning comes pretty easy. If I had a “training” goal in this lesson it was to work on recall. We spent approximately 30 minutes exploring, 10 minutes playing frisbee, and I gave him exactly 1 recall command. We will do more work today but this is typically how we start it.

01/19/2025

Early morning fun with my boy Boone.

01/03/2025

This is Boone, a new board and train that I picked up yesterday. Today we had our first outing. I took him to some of the places we will be working later just to explore. He was curious about everything. Little unsure but still wanted to check things out. Best thing for me to do there is stay out of his way and let him.

12/17/2024

Sunday loves middle, especially when you’re not asking for it

10/23/2024

Bringing River along through play has been a really fun process. She was always into play but her game of “keep away” wasn’t much fun for her owner. So I had to show her that there was more value in cooperative play than in doing her own thing. Tug was an easy start. That’s what increased the value of bringing the toy back. Then it was pretty easy to start playing tug with the frisbee and then throwing it with a tug ending. Now we have a fun game.